


Inscrutable Machine

by HAL_berd



Category: Sdorica: Sunset (Video Game)
Genre: Jargon jargon jargon, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-02-08 12:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18623497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HAL_berd/pseuds/HAL_berd
Summary: As the years ticked by, and they received more and more visits, Charle began to wonder if they were ever meant to succeed.(A small AU set in the perspective of Charle and Morris working on the Runic Guardian.)





	1. A Beast Called Denial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morris told himself time and time again that this was just another step to furthering his career.  
> Charle had trouble convincing himself that he had moved on from Gotthold's death.

It was raining outside.

Morris could hear the tapping of the droplets on the roof of his lab. Rainy days were always the best for long bouts of research. They weren't severe enough to deter the most dedicated of lab aides, but plenty to dispose of the other riff-raff, so rainy days were some of his most productive.

So the question was why the  _hell_ he was spending _this_ rainy day  _here_.

The dusty little alcove that Charle had chosen for his moping spot was far from ideal for laboratory conditions, but here Morris was, trying to find a good way to organize the materials that dumbass had horded here. He'd left books on the floor.  _On the floor_.

But who was dumber: Charle for choosing it, or Morris, for requesting the transfer?

It had been a poor decision to move his lab here; it lacked the proper furniture and large equipment even if Morris' collection accounted for any small or medium-sized tools they needed, and the place stank of dust and mold. Morris told himself that of course it had to be here. The project needed to stay out of the umbrella of grant funding for its questionable ethical character, lest they be dragged into some inane board meeting over the possible misuse of artificial intelligence. He told himself that in the grand scheme of things, the success of the Runic Guardian, if such an ambitious plan could ever succeed, would plaster his name across both fields of magic research.

Seriously, they'd probably name a building after him. Like, build a completely new building, and then  _put his name on it_.

He gave himself innumerable logical reasons for why he was  _here_ and why he was on this project at all when it was outlandishly risky, but they slipped his mind the moment the door cracked open.

"You took your damn time, didn't you?" he grumbled as Charle stumbled in.

The man looked decrepit. The usual bulk of his robes hung off of his body in a great, sopping mess, bags hung on yet more bags, which hung on the man's droopy golden eyes, and by the way he was fidgeting, he was operating on a couple pints of coffee. By most descriptions, Charle looked no better than he did just a few short months ago.

Except he was smiling.

Morris frowned. "Why didn't you use a shielding charm, idiot? There's enough mold in here already."

Charle swayed a bit in the doorway, but his smile did not lose that serene quality that it took on every time he'd just concluded some convoluted train of magical thinking.

"I was distracted," he mumbled, "thinking of a way to reduce the soul energy refraction on the fifteenth rune overlay, but after examining the data you gathered last time, I think I've got it."

With that, he began to amble towards the disassembled Runic Guardian, but Morris immediately stepped in.

"Nope, nuh-uh," he said. "You aren't getting _near_ our hard work when you're that wet and tired."

Charle blinked owlishly at him, not fully processing his words, and then looked down at his drenched robes. Perturbed, he attempted a quick charm to heat away the water, but  _of course_ it failed with his current state of affairs. He was operating on empty.

Morris sighed and dried the man's clothes and hair off for him. Seriously,  _he_ was supposed to be the one with issues getting enough sleep when working, not this idiot.

"Look, we don't need you drifting off in the middle of an engraving and ruining months of effort, okay?" Morris turned him around by the shoulders to point towards a set of stairs. "I dusted off a bed in the rafters this morning. Almost got bitten by a rat—By the way, you know this place you chose really sucks, yeah?"

"Yeah?" Charle responded absently, vowel sound dragged on with his yawning.

Morris grunted, resigned. "Yeah, it does. But it has a bed. Take a nap."

He began pushing Charle up the stairs, and the man complied.

"You'll wake me up in...twenty...thirty minutes...right?" he asked.

Good god. Morris was supposed to be the one saying that.

"Yeah, sure, whatever," Morris mumbled. With that, he shoved Charle onto the dinky little twin bed that he'd found and marched back down the stairs.

Once upon a time, Charle had not been this much of a disaster. Well, that's not to say he had been any better than Morris at taking care of himself while working (he'd seen the man close himself into his lab with nothing but a bag of wasabi peas—for _five days_ ), but sleep was  _Morris'_ thing to skip out on.

At least, it had been, before that blonde kid died.

Charle had been like this since. For months, little sleep, little food, closing himself into this musty shithole of an excuse for a laboratory, and Morris had not seen him smile once in those first few months. He didn't know why that had been so... _disturbing_. He supposed it had to do with Charle's near perpetual patience, eternal grin, and jolly laugh, before everything had gone to shart. And then? Just gone. All of it. The perfect professor had begun skipping classes, and that smile had just dropped off the face of the planet.

It had been...

Jarring.

But then Morris had joined him.

Charle was doing no better than before, except he was _smiling_. With Morris here, they were making faster progress. The going was less rough with two brains instead of one.

Morris put his face in his hands and sighed.

Name on a building.

(Charle's laugh was starting to come back too.)

The Dietrich Building of Life Magic Studies.

(He was  _smiling_ again.)

His name, engraved in the stone above a doorway.

 _That's_ what he was here for.

* * *

It was raining outside.

Charle stepped into it without hesitation. Rain helped him think; it pattered against his skull, banging, banging, and drove away the persistent image of jaws crunching through flesh, snapping bone until the jagged fragments of white ribs pierced through skin, painted red with blood and slick with chunks of hot, steaming gore. It drove away the memory of blank blue eyes, a halo of golden hair smeared with crimson fluid, arms bent out in wrong angles—

When the sounds of the rain set in, he began his calculations. The Runic Guardian was for the sake of all of the students' safety; of course he had to put in all the time and effort something as important as that entailed. It helped that now that he and Morris were making good progress, the work **—** the design of procedures, the lengthy calculations, the exploration of theory—helped drive out his memories, but first and foremost, the project was for the students and the students only. It would keep them safe.

Rain and work.

The Runic Guardian had such a complex web of rune patterns that not all of it could possibly fit scrawled on the outside. That's where Charle's work came in. His graduate thesis had been on a method of "pattern overlaying," or setting rune patterns on top of each other within a layered rune item to maximize the volume of the medium. Of course, the method, though revolutionary, was not without its caveats.

Rain and work.

The issue was with soul energy refraction. The main negative of pattern overlaying was that some rune patterns distorted the flow of the soul energy infused into them before releasing, greatly affecting how that soul energy would infuse into any pattern engraved on the layer on top or below. The seemingly random selection of patterns that did this, considering that not all patterns had been tested and approved for overlay, made breaking new ground with the technique an absolute pain. Perhaps...perhaps...

("—Gotthold, look out—")

 _Rain_ _and work._

He shook his head and continued to ponder.

He had moved on from his star pupil's death. That's why he was pouring everything into this project; he had moved on and now he was improving the world with the lessons he'd learned from that tragedy. This was not just for Gotthold—

("— _Gotthold, look out—_ ")

 _This was not just for Gotthold_ —it was for the entire student body. It was for all of the world, even. Everything dangerous could be made safer by the use of a remotely controlled artificial body. Fewer people would have to suffer that horror.

( _Was that...? Was that bone? Poking through the boy's chest and speared at an angle out of his academy clothes—something white, coated in a layer of red—_ )

Rain and work.

When had he last eaten? Two...three...three days ago. That was...acceptable. As long as he ate tonight he could get by. Sleep? He had caught a few hours between conducting trials with Morris through last night and the morning classes that he had barely dragged himself through teaching. He'd had a bit of coffee today too, so he figured it shouldn't present an issue. 

(Sleep was difficult.)

(Every night brought a new type of knot for the boy's intestines.)

Rain and work.

By the time he reached the door, he had a good idea of what to do with the problem Morris had posed after their work last night. Progress. Morris had brought with him progress, and progress was enough to make Charle feel like he was even remotely making up for—

 _Rain and work_.

He entered without knocking.

"You took your damn time, didn't you?" Morris questioned from his place on the bench.

Charle took a second to process that, and by the time he had, Morris was off like a shot.

"God, you're soaked," Morris growled. "Why didn't you use a shielding charm, idiot? There's enough mold in here already."

He couldn't. He liked the rain. So he smiled serenely at Morris and offered his explanation.

"I was distracted...thinking of a way to reduce the soul energy refraction on the fifteenth rune overlay, but after examining the data you gathered last time, I think I've got it."

He just needed to change that pattern's configuration a bit; it would only take a second. He just needed to work—

He was so tired.

Morris caught him before he could do anything stupid. Maybe if he went to sleep exhausted like this, he would sleep dreamless. As his head hit the pillow, he reminded himself that if he kept going like this, he would probably get himself killed by some careless mistake.

Except Morris was here to keep him from doing that.

And it was for the students. After a short nap, he  _needed_ to work.

For the students. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Chapter: A Vice Called Wonderlust


	2. A Vice Called Wonderlust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One day, they would look upon this moment and say that it was wonderlust. They would be lying.

_"Get some sleep tonight, Charle," Morris said, idly scratching away at some minor calculation on his desk. "Tomorrow's a big day, and we don't want you dropping the thing before we get up there."_

_When Charle yawned, Morris did too._

_"Hypocrite," Charle mumbled sleepily. "I could say the same to you."_

_Unsurprisingly, when neither party was willing to stop, they both barreled onward, well into the dark and inky night._

* * *

They hauled the skeleton of the thing up to Atlas one early weekend morning.

It had hundreds of patterns folded into its layers, but still it seemed like little more than a shell of the machine it would have to become to fulfill its grand purpose. A couple months of conjecture (mostly on Morris’ end, as Charle had already reached his ceiling in abstract thinking) had thrown together a series of experimental patterns on the exterior. Given that conditions were consistent with what they had previously calculated, the Runic Guardian would, theoretically, function as predicted. Or at least check some of the boxes on their admittedly vague ideations.

"It really isn't as uncertain as you're making it out to be," Morris grunted as Charle finally released his spell and set the thing down in the snow. "I guess I can't expect a lower intellect individual to understand, but I, for one, am certain that there's nothing dangerous in there."

Charle knew as well as him, actually, but he couldn't much help the pit of apprehension that opened in his gut.

He peered into the machine's blue eye. It was a simple crystal sphere, with half the etchings of a broken remote projection matrix trailing out of sight. For every one of its functional portions, the machine had a widget that had simply been abandoned and disconnected for the time being. Even if this trial were to work, they were still only a fraction of the way toward the distant goal Charle wished to achieve.

And Charle swore he could see light disappear in the machine's optics, meandering a refraction-obscured path that could very well have no end.

"It won't explode, no," Charle said. "But suppose it doesn't work." If it didn't, he didn't know what he would do. It would be a failure—to himself, to his students. To Gotthold.

Morris snorted. "Don't ask inane questions; they waste a genius' time," he muttered, half asleep. "If it doesn't work, then we fix it until it does. No project I do is ever gonna make it into the history books if I give up on every new thing the first time it fails."

Charle shook his head, chuckling despite his dark mood. "You always have the most honorable of intentions, Morris."

"Yeah, yeah," Morris replied, rolling his eyes. "Now pass me the caffeine. It's too damn cold here for me to be this tired."

Charle handed him the flask before the other man walked off to triple check the conditions, leaving him very much alone.

It was barely dawn, he noted. The sun had just peeked over the horizon.

He scuffed the ground at his feet. They were graced with a light snow at least; a rare reprieve for the chaotic paths of Atlas. A thin blanket covered the icy ground and the ruins around him. Behind, the curtain of white touched the broken, jagged ends of a metal fence, with the haunting silhouettes of frozen headstones spilling over each spike. The snow lined the desolate spires of the old Atlas Church, the decrepit building's shadow looming over his shoulder in the dimness of the morning sun as he wondered if he would find blood should he thin the white in the right places.

It had to work, he resolved. He didn't know what he would do if it didn't.

Morris came back after a good fifteen minutes, higher in awareness but lower in the contents of the flask he passed back to Charle.

"Still some left in there for you," Morris said, stretching.

"How generous of you to save me some of the coffee I made," Charle replied, mood lifted once again. Strange how the one person who could truly piss him off in the past was now the only person who could pull him back onto his feet.

Morris flashed him his usual cocky smirk. "I pride myself on my magnanimity as well as my dashing good looks and utter genius."

Morris gave him a moment to down the rest of the drink before continuing on.

"Conditions consistent on your end, right?" the man asked as Charle capped his flask. "All according to calculation?"

Charle nodded. "All identical. No deviations at all."

Morris grinned. "Good. Then it's time for the first operation test!"

Charle cleared from Morris' field of operation, ready at a moment's notice to flip open his rune medium should something go horribly wrong. He watched the other man barely take a breath...

Before immediately activating the energy matrix.

Charle blinked at the lack of movement, but as he looked closer he could see that Morris was still deep in concentration. It was not a failure, but a lack of control; Morris was pulling, but the tangles in the machine's patterns were pulling back, keeping the mass stationary despite his every command.

But then the machine shuddered.

Joints groaned and bolts strained against the orders carved into the machine's body, but surely, the more energy Morris infused into the machine, the more it began to bend to their will. One limb shakily rose to brace against the ground, then the other.

And then, with the rumbling of some great beast thundering over the prairies, it rose, tremulously, to its feet.

"...Success," Charle declared quietly.

Morris let out the breath he'd been holding and nearly succumbed to his sleep deprivation in relief, but Charle caught him and shook him by the shoulders.

"Morris," he said, his momentary desperation melting into a great, shining excitement. The path was long, but their first step had been...It had worked.

"Morris, we did it!" he exclaimed, enthusiastic. "It worked!"

The man batted his hands away and huffed.

"Calm yourself, old man. Of course it did," he said, but his happiness shone through his faux irritation. "The Runic Guardian was made through our joint efforts after all, and you have a genius like me working on it—"

Charle latched onto him again, eyes shining.

"Quick, let's see it move!" he cut in.

Morris sighed. "Man, you won't even let me speak."

With a turn, he waved Charle to stand aside once again.

"You just be quiet and observe!"

With that, Morris activated the control link, and the true test began.

Though every motion Morris tried to bring the machine through was met with some measure of lag or inconsistency, the main success was in the execution of a functional control link at all. Slow kneels, turns, jumps, all worked, if not perfectly, and even though rapid movement met with some command drops, the main motions were there.

When Morris made the machine slowly wave its gangly arm back and forth in Charle's direction, the older professor could not help but chuckle. 

"I can't believe it," Charle said, covering his smile with a hand. It hurt to smile this wide for the first time in so long. "I really just...can't believe it."

And Morris smiled back.

But it wasn't meant to last.

The monsters swept in like a storm, seeping into the cracks of the machine's body and forever obscuring the path in its endless eye.

* * *

"I'm sorry."

Charle could feel Morris' red eyes leering down at him.

"Louder. I can't hear you."

Charle's hands clenched around the ice on the ground, and he tried once again to close off that feeling of failure, ignore the thoughts that told him that Gotthold's blood was in the snow and on his robes. He'd said it, even though he was nearly sure it had been lost to the winds. He'd gone and said what it was, that when he was wandering that road of sleep deprivation and borderline anorexia, of day-and-night work, he didn't have to remember the way his student had splintered like a twig in the snow. That his blood was in the snow, this snow. He stood, brushed the flakes off his clothing—enough to straighten his appearance, but the frost still clung, chilling, to the fabric—and glanced at the machine that sat broken on the ground, lid closed shut over its cracked and shattered eye.

"I am sorry, Morris," he said, louder. "I got overwhelmed by emotion and lost myself."

What would happen, he wondered, if he swept the entire project away now? What would happen, if he took the flower in the fluted vase off of that desk in the front middle of his classroom so that he could finally look his other students in the eye?

Charle shivered from the chill in his robes but ignored it as he looked to Morris, the both of them turned hesitantly towards the road that pointed back to the machine.

"Are you willing...to throw caution to the winds with me once again?"

When they left Atlas that day, the remains of the machine dragged them down the steep mountain path moreso than they moved it, all the way back to the teleport pad.

* * *

"Jeez, I was joking about the...the artificial intelligence thing before, but..." Morris paused, ordering another shot for himself and Charle, "...looks like we might... _actually_ have to do that now."

Charle nodded, scribbling something down furiously even as his normally illegible handwriting slipped more and more into anarchy. His cheeks were glowing a jolly red from having just teleported from the cold foot of the Atlas mountains, back to their lab, and then into the warmth of the nearest tavern, but they were also alight with something fierce and passionate. Whatever it was, it had to be better than that dark, lonely expression that had surfaced when the older professor had started shouting nonsense into the wind.

Morris downed his third...fourth...? Fourth, and then slipped back into his mental fervor.

Artificial intelligence, the kind autonomous enough to distinguish against beings with malintent, human or otherwise... It really was straight out of a fairy tale. He'd seen it done in those foreign mechanical people, but to translate that kind of sentient mechanical programming (which was already a jealously guarded secret) into rune patterns of all things, and simultaneously suppressing that intelligence enough to allow the remote control of the body by an outside being...

It was, strictly speaking, impossible. And he wasn't one to back down from a challenge, but...

(He was better spent elsewhere.)

(It was so risky.)

(This wasn't even his field.)

(It was never going to succeed.)

(He would obtain no recognition because it would _never succeed_.)

 

 

(Charle would fail without him.)

 

 

 _Well_ , he resolved, pulling out his own notebook and pen as he called for another round,  _the more outlandish it is, the more satisfying it'll be when I solve it._

He passed a shotglass to Charle, who emptied it almost robotically, and the two of them fell back into their work for the machine, pushing each other along to wander down that path, further and further into the dark and inky night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't speak Japanese, but I'm pretty sure one of Morris' voice lines invites Charle out for drinks after work, so have a tavern scene. There will be more.


	3. A Quandary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things have been going missing around the lab, and apparently in reason too.

 "Charle, have you seen a um..." Morris clicked his fingers trying keep his mouth on pace with his racing mind. "A journal page. It's that diagram of the Guardian's energy matrix you drew up. I annotated it—just a couple notes in red—and it's not there anymore."

Charle yawned as he looked up at his little corner of the mess. Nothing in red; his writing was always in blue or black.

"Not here," he answered. "I could always just draw up another if you can't find it."

Morris shook his head. "I found a few curiosities in how your matrix functioned—nothing wrong, your design was infuriatingly functional," he assured quickly at Charle's alarmed look. "It was just some points of interest behind why your methods work. Anyways, I'd scribbled some hypotheses and the beginnings of a relevant procedure. It's those I'm looking for."

"Don't you have it perfectly preserved somewhere in that big brain of yours?" Charle teased.

"Har har." Morris looked murderous. "No, I don't. And I don't have time to redesign the experiment, execute it, analyze my data, _and_ organize it into a comprehensive presentation for the conference  _four days from now_."

Charle blinked.

"The Life Magic conference is _four days from now_ , and you don't have your data?"

"It snuck up on me because this _super secret_ project has been devouring all my time," Morris seethed. "The only reason I haven't given up yet is because I thought I could salvage some principle of this work and twist it into Life Magic."

"Not altogether unrealistic," Charle commented. Life Magic and Applied Magic were fundamentally linked, and everything they broke new ground on here could be considered Life Magic at its core.

"Yeah, but it's all gone to _shit_ now 'cuz that sheet's gone missing," the other man bemoaned, puffing out air in utter frustration.

Charle watched Morris' turned figure scratch frantically at his head. It was off-putting to see the normally cocky man so distressed; it made him itch to get on his feet and do...something.

"If you would like, Morris," he began, "I could assist you. I may not be able to keep up with your thinking all that well, but I'd like to believe myself useful in experiment design, and it's the least I could do for everything you've done for me—"

" _Don't_ ," Morris hissed, whirling around in a tempest of robes and mussed hair. " _Don't_ act like this is me trying to help you, Charle. It's not just _your_ project. This isn't for _you_. I'm doing you  _no_ favors."

And that's when Charle stood.

It took a solid five minutes of steadying breaths and Charle's hand on the man's back to get him back in a rational state of mind, but by the end of it, Morris was slumped in his chair, glumly nursing his third mug of coffee that day. Charle was seated across from him with a sympathetic sort of patience.

"Funds running dry?" he questioned Morris, softly.

Morris shook his head, still trying to accommodate this dizzying new level of stress.

"You have no idea," he muttered. "I must've marked it somewhere. This conference is the one chance I've got to make up for the deficits from some of my department's grad projects, but I don't think I've looked in my planner for weeks."

Charle, pensive, and feeling perhaps more than a little bit accountable for Morris' predicament, responded, "It may have been ignorant of me to insinuate your attitude towards our partnership, but my offer still stands."

"As if I'd put myself in your debt like that," Morris shot back derisively, scowl hidden behind the lip of his mug. "And don't you dare say anything about paying me back or this piping hot coffee's going straight in your face, and we both know you hate it black." 

Charle sighed. "I wouldn't dream of it."

Morris looked at him skeptically before putting the coffee down.

"That being said, you'll be on your own for the coming week," Morris said. "This kind of work is gonna need some of the bigger equipment we have in the Aceso Building, so I'll be there most of the day."

Charle managed to maintain his smile, but inside, he was hesitating.

Alone?

It wasn't like he'd never worked alone, but it was only in the face of change that he realized he'd spent this past year in near constant company. If not in the presence of his students, he was pulling nights with Morris or recuperating in the moth-eaten single bed in the rafters with the soothing scritch of quill strokes from below chasing away the bad dreams. He was...unsure of how he would fare if left to his own devices.

He tried to get his head on straight. He would be fine without Morris. He'd survived on his own plenty well before.

"Good luck to you, then," he said. "If I do find that paper with your original procedures, I'll be sure to drop it off at Aceso."

He received a grunt in thanks.

He had to savor the moments Morris spent finishing off his coffee before hurrying out of the lab, plunging Charle into an eerie, all-consuming silence.

* * *

Morris was frustrated as all hell, and he would be very unhappy to admit it.

Normally, he could focus on a single subject for hours at a time, but even in the face of this urgent deadline, he just couldn't pull it off. He had already redrawn the section of the matrix he was interested in—there was this particularly clever little routing Charle had done in the flow of soul energy, where the stream passed by a previous stream system at a certain angle and distance, and the two streams would thus "waste" less soul energy by collecting each other's dispersed flow.

 _It's a trick of the trade_ , Charle's voice said in his head.  _It's rather inexact actually. Depending on the circumstance, a different angle and distance will do the trick, but nobody's gone and found a formula for it yet, and that can get pretty frustrating when even a slight deviation from exact will negate the effect._

He could vividly recall the man's cheeky little smile when his uncalculated parameters had worked too. 

_It's my life's work. Of course I have the intuition for it._

He wondered how Charle was doing on his own, whether he was getting work done or just sulking away like he'd been before Morris had joined up on the project. He wondered—

He shook his head. He had his recreation of the plans; he just needed to get  _Charle out of his head_ so he could  _think_.

Reverse engineering the formula would obviously be tedious and unfeasible given his time restraints. By that, he meant testing angles and distances for random variables and drawing correlations until a mathematical formula could be created; no, that would be the stupid approach. Morris was not stupid—he had more direction. He had his hypothesis, in that he suspected it had to do with the width of oscillation that each type of Rune Item incited in its energy streams. Energy dispersal in rune items, from what little Applied Magic he knew from Charle's explanations, was carried out primarily through a scattering from MIO (Medium Induced Oscillation)—

 _I'm sure_ that _topic's a little more up your alley, Morris_ _. Your paper on MIO waveforms was positively enlightening._

That compliment had satisfied him more than any review from his Life Magic peers, bafflingly enough—

Morris growled and pushed himself back on track.

Because it was MIO, which was a topic that often blurred the line between Life Magic and Applied Magic but somehow fell on Morris' side of the split, he was confident he could figure it out. He remembered all of his reasoning for it: the nature of MIO interference between waves would account for the precision of the required distance and angle. He'd previously written out all of his procedures in a moment of boredom, with Charle's steady breathing drifting down from the rafters, but for some reason, in the silence of the Aceso Building labs, he just couldn't recreate them in a quality befitting of his normal research—

_I'm rested now, Morris. You've been up for hours; go take the bed for a couple—_

Morris abruptly stood and marched for the doorway to the main lobby.

He knew exactly what this was. He'd been suppressing it for years, but it had never been this bad. He thus attributed this abhorrent, symptomatic flightiness to a lack of sleep and the wide discrepancy between constant exposure and prolonged isolation. Perhaps with a bit of natural sunlight and a breath of fresh air, he could shove it down like he had in grad school every time he'd caught a flash of irritating silver.

Except, he was on the stairs for the main doorway when he spotted the devil himself pacing around floor two.

"Charle," he called, halting his descent halfway between the second and ground levels. "What the hell are you doing on Professor Albright's floor?"

He watched Charle jolt at his voice, turning to look at him with wide, owlish eyes. Frozen. 

"...Morris?" the man called back softly. 

Morris rolled his eyes and climbed the couple steps to the second floor.

"No, it's Cyrus," he drawled sarcastically. "Of course it's me!"

"I..." Charle fumbled around with his hair, which was looking considerably neater and cleaner than it was this morning, and just continued to stare with an almost dopey bewilderment. "Hello."

Morris snorted. "Hey. Now answer my question."

"I'm sorry, what...?"

"Why are you on Professor Albright's floor."

Morris watched the man blink, swearing he could hear the cogs click-clicking in their struggle to turn in Charle's head. What was up with him?

"I...got lost," Charle finally answered. "I was looking for you."

Morris frowned.

"You were literally here _two days ago_ helping me steal some tools from my old lab," he said. "You  _know_ my area of Life Magic is on the third floor."

Charle looked similarly skeptical. "It is? I could've sworn..."

And then, as if reaching an epiphany, Charle smacked his forehead and sighed.

"Yes. Third floor," the man conceded.

"You're an idiot," Morris said, face neutral. "Did you just wake up from a nap? You're acting like a dope and your bags are...considerably smaller."

"Y-Yes, I took a very long nap," Charle replied, smiling brighter than Morris had seen since the incident in Atlas. It was... uh...

In his current state of mind, it brought him back to grad school. Shit.

He coughed. "Wow. I'm gone for half a day and all you can do is sleep."

Charle chuckled and, grin slightly dimmed, replied, "Well, you know how it is. I just can't seem to do anything right without you and your big brain."

That left Morris speechless. Charle had teased him like that before, but there was something too genuine about the tone of his voice, in the way his eyes were part closed in a biting sort of sadness. In the hesitant reverence of his shaking hands.

Everything was wrong here, Morris could tell, and he had half a mind to slap the man to snap him out of it, or laugh in his face, or march away to sort his thoughts out, or all of the above, in order.

"Here," Charle said, digging a sheet of paper out of his robes and handing it over. "I found this lying around."

Morris looked down, and there was the Guardian's energy diagram, marked up in his signature red, with the addition of a couple scribbled notes in Charle's blue ink handwriting. He was opening his mouth to maybe say something halfway appreciative when arms closed around his shoulders.

He blanked.

"I've missed you," Charle whispered next to his ear. "Heavens, I've missed you, so, _so_ much."

Before he could properly recover from the feeling of breath _right fucking next to his ear_ , the main door was swinging closed and Charle was gone.

* * *

Morris saw Charle nearly jump out of his skin when he burst through the door into their lab.

 _Good_ , he thought.  _He_ should _be scared_.

"What," he spat out, "the  _fuck_ was _that?_ "

"I..." Charle's eyes were about as wide as they were before, with the same amount of alarm and about five times the darkness underneath them. Morris couldn't just attribute it to different lighting either, because his hair had returned to its messy and unwashed state (he could see a damn spider in there for heaven's sake), and his clothes had re-rumpled somehow. _Something_ fishy had happened here. "I...what?"

Morris took a good long minute to consider how to approach this. There were several possibilities, not all mutually exclusive:

One, he had been hallucinating about Charle's cleaned up state earlier.

Two, Charle was hallucinating at the moment and that was why he looked so damn confused.

Three...something exceptionally strange had just happened, and if he didn't play his cards right, he would severely embarrass himself.

"Did you go to the Aceso Building today," he asked, really more demanded. "Think carefully. Through the sleep deprivation."

"No...?" Charle responded, looking a little less like he was going to have a heart attack. "No!"

 _Okay,_ Morris thought, trying to logic out this mess.  _This alters the conversation then._

"One more question, so just bear with me," he said. He held up the sheet he'd been handed earlier. "Did you find this?"

Charle raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean? It's right there in your hand."

"No, I mean, did you see it some time between me walking out that door this morning," he jabbed a finger towards the entrance, "and me walking back in."

Charle looked well and truly baffled.

"No," he replied. "Of course not."

"Okay," Morris replied, taking a breath. "Okay."

Charle stood and walked towards him, looking extremely concerned. "Morris, are you alright? What's this about?"

The care in the man's eyes made Morris sputter. He could see the smile again. Feel the breath tickling his ear.

_I've missed you._

_Heavens, I've missed you, so,_ so,  _much._

He shook his head. There was something much more interesting going on here, and Morris knew himself to be a man driven more by matters of the mind than by matters of...lesser import.

( _Besides_ , he thought, _it wasn't even real._ )

"I'm fine, you oaf," he said, grinning in a most worrying way, "but I think we have a doppelganger on our hands."


End file.
